Marie Forleo on SALES: Why Preventing the WRONG Clients Changes EVERYTHING – Are You Ready?

Today and this whole two days. We all know that when you come to a Joe Polish event, you are definitely going to get ideas to get more customers in the door. You're also going to learn some ideas to catapult conversions and can pretty much guarantee you're going to learn how to increase sales. But not for me. Today, I'm going to tell you how to prevent sales.

That's right.

I'm going to talk about sales prevention. Now, before you think that I have lost my damn mind and you want to run out of this room, let me tell you why. Sales prevention can be not only really sexy, but extremely lucrative. So some results for my business. Over the last three years, due to sales prevention, really effective sales prevention, we've increased our revenue 725%. Thanks to sales prevention. We've watched our B school enrollments, which is the program that Joe is talking about, grow 2,996%. And one of my favorite stats, which I'm most proud of, we took the refund rate from when we started B school, which was hovering around 19%, which is not unusual for our industry in information and education, and we've taken it downtown to 1.5%. That's been consistent over the last three years. So I want to show you how sales prevention works because it's literally produced millions of dollars in my business. And more importantly, it's helped me produce a brand that not only we love internally as the company, but our customers love even more and they can trust. So hopefully there'll be some ideas in here for you that you can translate into millions of dollars for your brand and your business and help it to grow. Cool. So two examples of sales prevention. First example, when I'm promoting B school, I do what many of us do in this room. You go out and you start talking about it. So whether you do speaking engagements, for me, I do a lot of videos, a lot of webinars, and often teleseminars. So one of the most recent teleseminars I did had a couple of thousand people on it. Super fun. I love talking to people, hearing about their businesses, and of course, telling them whether or not B school is right for them. So I'm on this teleseminar, Good time woman gets on the line and starts telling me about her life, asking all kinds of questions. And of course, she got to the place where everybody gets to on these teleseminars. Marie, is B school right? For me, it became evident that it wasn't, and I knew it. So after just a moment of awkward silence, I said no. B school is actually not right for you. You sound amazing, you sound lovely. But based on everything that you just shared, I recommend X books, X resources. They would deliver more value to you than my program. My program would be a waste of money for you right now. The host of that teleseminar was shocked as shit. I could feel the uncomfortability. But it was the right thing to do. Now why was sales prevention in that instance so powerful? Three reasons. Number one, it's a pattern interrupt in our world where there's a lot of marketing, marketing, marketing, sell, sell, sell for customers. To hear the founder of a company volitionally telling someone, no, do not give me money. This is not right for you. They sit up and pay attention because you know people on teleseminars are doing like 15 other things. That's like a record scratch. Yes. Reason number two, for the people that we do encourage to join B school, they feel like the chosen ones, because they are. This isn't a manipulation technique, it's the truth. When people know that you actively not sell to people, when you discourage them, the people that you do sell to believe you because it's honest and it's true. Cool. The third reason is that level of brutal honesty is so refreshing. Let me ask you this. Has anyone here ever gone clothes shopping? Have you ever gone clothes shopping on your own?

Right.

All by yourself, got no friends, you walk into the store, pull a bunch of clothes off the rack, go into the dressing room, you come out, you're nervous, you ask the sales associate, do I look okay in this? Does this look good? And you know, you've had that experience or something. Oh my God, you look fabulous. Don't worry. It's a little tight, but that's really in. You should take it, go. You get the clothes home, you try them on, you look in the mirror, you look like a friggin sausage. You should not have bought those clothes, but you were sold to them by someone you trusted. Now counter that with another experience. If you've ever had this one. Go into the store, get some clothes, try them on, walk out, does this look good on me? And the sales associate says, you know what? Not so flattering. You should try this or come back when we have more inventory. Which store would you go back to? Which store would you talk about? Second example of active sales prevention. This is my favorite one. This is really what helped us take that refund rate down from about 19% down to 1.5 now. We did other things, but this was One of the main changes. So I'm a student and a fan and a lover of marketing. So when I started B school I used one of the timeless marketing principles, risk reversal. We all know about risk reversal, right? Usually it's an awesome idea. Try my stuff. 30 days. You don't like it, just let us know, we'll give you all your money back. Anyone ever used that one before? Sometimes it works. So we had that guarantee for B school when we first started the program. But that 19% refund rate, I know I'm not supposed to take any of that stuff personally, but I do. I saw that number, I wanted to friggin throw up. That was disgusting to me. I put so much time and energy and heart into everything that I produce, every single thing that to know that one in five people were walking out of my company, not only taking their money back, which gets the business side of me, but the other side of me thinking they weren't happy, I didn't give them a great experience. This sucks, so I gotta change it. So I looked at the curriculum, I didn't think it was that. I had this intuitive hit, it was that damn refund policy. So I said, you know what, I want to change this. I'm going to try something different. I'm going to create an action takers guarantee. Here's what it sounds like. You can come and try B school, do it for 30 days if you don't feel like we've delivered on our promise. All you need to do to be eligible for a refund is turn in your completed homework. If you do the B school work and you don't get value, we do not deserve your money at all. One change, super powerful. And again, we did some other things but I really believe that was the biggest big change. Took that refund rate all the way down to 1.5%. So let's dig a little bit deeper and look at why. One of the reasons sales prevention. It helped get all the pitas and the pains in the asses and the whiners and the non committed people. They are not signing up for my shit. My shit is expensive. So if they know they got to work in order to be eligible for a refund, you really think they're going to come in the door? No. Then the second thing it did for the people it is right for. And for me. I'm looking for people that are very action oriented, very committed. That's a challenge to them. They know I take this program seriously. If I'm saying, look, if you do the work and you don't get value, I'll give you everything back. They're like, whoa, she actually cares about our success. The third thing that it did, which was amazing, is it helps bond the community. One of the best things that we have going for us is our amazing community. They sell for us. So when people are in B school together and they know based on how we've structured things that A, we care about their success, but B, even more importantly, everyone else in there is a player. Doesn't matter where they're at in their journey, they are in it to win it. That gives them a reason to bond stronger. It's a stronger community and they spread the word more prolifically.

Make sense?

So I know I've had fun here framing this discussion around sales prevention, but what it's really about is how can we make our marketing more honest, more transparent, and more courageous? How can we have a little more courage in our marketing? So I want you to ask yourself, in your business, are you doing enough active sales prevention? Are you giving enough attention to articulating and creating obstacles to keep the people out who you really are not meant to serve so that you can devote more energy and more love and more caring to those you do? And I'll leave you with just this one final thought. What if the big secret to exploding your sales was having the courage every so often to prevent them?

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

So we have talked about a lot about marketing, some of the best marketing ideas on the planet in this room. But we all know that if we don't bring people to a decision, no transformation happens. The difference that we really all want to make on the planet doesn't actually get made until people decide yes or no. So what if in the next 10 minutes you could learn how to bring people to a decision on the spot? Regardless of what industry you're in in any situation, that's what we're up to. The biggest question I get is, Lisa, how have you from home, with two toddlers in tow, created a company still from home that's made the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies two years in a row. The first year number 169 well, this is how I've done it. This is my model. I call it Lisa's seven Figure Love youe Life Blueprint. Because while I'm completely committed to my my purpose and entrepreneurs heart centered entrepreneurs, being able to make a difference, making irresistible offers, bringing people to a decision, I'm also committed to my lifestyle. Anybody else? Awesome. So as you see, the arrows all point to the irresistible offer. Everything in our business is built backwards. It's reverse engineered. We don't do anything without building it with the end in mind. The end being that point of decision, the real moment of transformation in your business. So whether it's high ticket selling, a one on one conversation podcast, possibly in office or on the phone or you're speaking, this could be live teleseminars or webinars or online promotion and delivery. The irresistible offer needs to be the starting place. And that's why we're going to work on that together today. I call this the sales conversion machine. And if you're feeling tired or you're spending a lot of too much money on your marketing, that's not paying off. This is what's missing, the sales conversion machine. So you ready to dive into irresistible offers? Who wants to know how to make them? It's easier than you think. Here we go. So first of all, I do have to say I know I have some skeptics. I know J.J. was one of the people. J.J. virgin. That brings a lot of people here to Genius Network. A lot of health professionals in the world and in this room. So I want you to know that if you're feeling like your industry might be one where an irresistible offer wouldn't apply because maybe you'd never hand out an order form. You can't imagine asking someone for a credit card on the spot. That JJ was actually now my best friend. But in 2009, one of the biggest skeptics of all, she was driving from Los Angeles to San Diego to do a talk for 12 doctors. She listened to a CD we had on making irresistible offers. JJ when she hears something, she implements quickly. That's why she's so successful, right? So she went there, made her irresistible offer to these 12 doctors about installing her health system in their office so they could add a cash element. Guess what? They weren't just interested. They wanted to try it for themselves. JJ held her ground and said, you know what? I can't do it with less than 15 people in the program. They called their spouses, they called their office managers. Before she left, she had closed 15 out of 12 125% of the room. So I want to invite you before we dive into how to make an irresistible offer, instead of sitting there wondering can this work for me, which is a very closed position, I want to invite you to do what they're teaching in my kids elementary school right now. It's called a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. Anybody else? Kids learning that? I love it. Anyway, I want to invite you to just write down this question as we're going through this. How can this work for me? How can this work in my industry? And you will have illuminations in the next six minutes. So first of all, what is an offer? Before we talk about irresistible, what is an offer? What am I talking about in the first place? So an offer is made up of two parts. Very simply put, there is the transformation that you provide, that unique outcome that is uniquely yours to bring to the market combined with the way you provide it. We call that your service delivery. For example, Joe's service delivery is we pick three two day weekends out of the year. That's how he provides the unique transformation of incredible networking and incredible marketing. You guys get it. So here's the trick with offers, think of it as the 9010 rule. Yet another application for the 9010 rule. You always want to focus 90% of your energy, your copy, your words, your enthusiasm on the outcome or the transformation that you provide. And only 10% on the service delivery on how you provide it. One of the biggest mistakes that we make, we're heart centered, we put so much love into everything we do is we swap those, we get into our offer and the next thing you know we're talking about the six 50 minute calls and the 10 in office appointments and the three day seminar that goes from 8am to midnight. And 27 hours of learning used to work, but people are so overwhelmed these days that we're actually shooting ourselves in the foot with that method. So if you just swap the ratio, 90:10, 90 on the service delivery. I'm sorry, 90 on your outcome or transformation. 10% on the service delivery. I could step off the stage and you would all have a big increase in sales conversion.

Right?

Right Now I promise. Here's an easy way to remember it. They are buying the destination, not the plane. So stop selling the plane. And I know you love the plane. It took a lot of hours to build it, but they don't care. They want the destination. Stay focused there. So why make an offer? This was brought up earlier. I wholeheartedly agree. It's a disservice not to make an offer. Now we all know it's a disservice because there's people who need us. We open the realm of possibility by talking about their financial future, their legacy. Fill in what you do, right? We open that. But when we don't make an offer, they don't get to step into it. They don't get to say yes to themselves. They don't get that new possibility to become a reality for them. But here's the part that we're missing the real disservice. When you're out there doing all the wonderful marketing that we all do and you're not making an offer, please don't shoot the messenger. You are doing the heavy lifting for your competition. And that's why we have 25 year veterans in this room that really should be owning their market space. And the six month newbies, the guys who just started out, they're coming in and getting the business because you're educating the market and they're making irresistible offers. So let's fix that. Let me show you the mechanics, exactly how to make your offers irresistible. It's quick, it's easy, but don't mistake it. It's very powerful. So you want to break your offers down always into three parts. Okay? The first part we call the main dish. The main dish is just the main way that you deliver that transformation or outcome that you provide. So if it's a three day seminar, a 90 day plan, an ebook, something online, however you deliver it, that's your main dish. The next we call bonuses. Now this is where we start to go from offer to irresistible offer. And I've got a couple rules around bonuses. Here they are. They need to be few, as in one or two, maybe three, and tightly related. So the bonus should actually have something to do with the offer. The person who paid money for the offer for the main dish, they should want to pay money also for the bonus and then they get it free. At that point it makes a huge difference and it can pop. Sales that you are working hard and following up to ad nauseam to be on the spot sales again in any industry. In our business with our Speak to sell virtual boot camp, we know that the next problem our clients will have is how to get booked. So the bonus is our get booked toolkit. When people realize that, they jump in right away. And the third one is limiters. And this is where people are losing the most sales and the most time limiters. There's really two main limiters, easy to remember, powerful to Apply time. So the limiter of time, whether you are speaking on a stage and you want to have people run to the back of the room and the time is this break only, or maybe you're in a corporate environment and, you know, they tell you that it's going to be about 30 days, and you suggest that if they could get back to you by Friday, before you were to book your next trip out to their area, you'd actually add on an additional half day to train their staff. A $5,000 value just let you know. You'd be shocked how much red tape gets passed when you just add that limiter of time in any situation. And the other quantity. So whether you are selling your new health program and you say, the first people that grab this program, we're going to put a pedometer on you right now so you can start tracking your steps and enjoying that transformation today.

Right?

You want to have quantity. Whether it's the number of appointments you can take in a week, something real that you create. Time, quantity. You can also combine those. So the bottom line is, if you want to make a difference in the world, which I know we all do, and you want to make great money doing it, you want to sell without being pushy or salesy. Structure is what gives you freedom and confidence to make your offers and make the difference you were made for.

I'm going to start with just showing you two quick pictures. So I'm going to flash a lot of things that you're not going to actually be able to see a lot. But the main things I actually want you to see are actually the things in red. So 7% and 15%. So I'm going to explain those pictures in a minute. The question is how. So what I'm going to cover in this talk is how to create a frame. How to actually have the people who are watching your messages or experiencing your material being in an environment like this, how to put the correct lenses on them. That's actually what Robert Cialdini's work is all about. And then ultimately, how to get people to make big decisions. How to make people or get people to take action. That's basically what this is all about. And I actually. Gina, I'm pretty sure that this is the wrong set of slides. I'm pretty confident this is the wrong set of slides. Anyways, that's me and Joel practicing this. I gave this talk at 100k about a month ago, and so I decided to reshare it. Anyways, we'll start with Robert Cialdini. So here are some of the quotes he said. There's a critical insight for those who want to learn to be more influential. The best persuaders become so through pre suasion, the process of arranging for recipients to be receptive to a message before they encounter it. To persuade optimally, then, it is necessary to pre swade optimally. But how? In part, the answer involves an essential but poorly appreciated tenant of all communication. So this is the key. What we present first changes what people experience. So what we present first changes the way people experience what we present to them next. That's the key. It's all about creating the context. And then when you create the context, you shape everything. So I'm going to just share with you one of my favorite psychological studies. This is a really funny study. You can look it up if you want. It's called Mind Over Milkshake. As you can see in the picture, basically there was two groups. One group was given a milkshake that they said was very healthy, low fat, gluten free, all those things, 104 calories. The other group was told that the milkshake that they were drinking was indulgent, totally filled with brownies, all sorts of stuff, 600 calories. The truth is that both of them were the exact same milkshake. This was all about framing. What the psychologists did is they ended up testing the people's blood and kind of the biological response of what happened after people took these milkshakes. And basically what it showed is that people had different physiological responses based on the framing of what they thought. There's a lot of interesting, kind of like the more stuff that Jamie Hope would understand kind of component of all that stuff. But basically the idea is that your framing not only influences your insights and your mindset, it literally influences your biology. So now I'm going to talk about how I've applied that principle to webinars recently.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

So this is a video that people land on when they come to my webinars. And basically what I say when people come to this video is I actually tell them that I don't want them to watch my webinar. I tell them that it would be a waste of time for them to watch my 60 minute training if they don't have the right perspective. I would rather them not consume more information. They already consumed so much information online. It's going to be a wasted 60 minutes. Both my wasted 60 minutes and their wasted 60 minutes if they do not have the right perspective. And so when they click that registration button, I say if you really want to watch this webinar, I want you to watch it from the right perspective. And so I've put together a seven minute video that's going to help you get into the right perspective. It's one of the things that Joe says it's one of the things that Robert Cialdini says you have to have the right mindset and the right setting, set and setting in order to have a transformational experience. That's actually true of therapy as well. Joe said it, he said people go to therapy not for information, they go for an experience. And so if you want people to have the right experience, they have to have the right perspective because you've got to create the right context. Basically what then happens is when people click the registration button, they go through this pre webinar training, it's seven minutes long, they watch it. And I just teach them a bunch of stuff that I'm already going to teach them in the webinar. But one of the things I do at the very end is, and I don't see a clock either on a 10 minute thing. So hopefully I'm not going too far overboard. But anyways, at the end of the training I make an offer, essentially a tripwire offer. I offer them a $7 journaling course. And one of the things I say is if you buy this course, you don't have to buy this course in order to watch the webinar. You've actually already registered for the webinar. But if you buy this course, two things are going to happen. You're going to be able to go through a few exercises that are going to help you have a much more powerful experience with the webinar. But also by spending $7 on this thing, thing we good, good. By spending $7 on this journaling course, you're also going to be invested. So this is one of the things that Joe says, let's see here. Joe Polish, Ph.D. he says if they don't pay, they don't pay attention. So one of the things I actually say at the end of that seven minute thing is I say, look, you don't have to buy this, but if you do buy it. You're going to have a completely different mindset for the webinar. It's only $7 to buy this journaling course, but it's essentially like buying a ticket. And if you're more invested, you're going to have far more commitment and you're going to have a different lens. And that $7 lens could be worth a lot of money to you. It's just like why we paid $25,000 to be in this room. The information we get in this room is valuable in a lot of ways because we're so invested financially it puts on a different set of lenses and commitments. And so I literally explain all this to them. And one of the things as part of the pre suasion principles is that you're striving to align their identity with what they're trying to accomplish. And obviously you're striving to have part of that be that they're making a decision that you're trying to help them make. And so that's actually one of the things that Dan Sullivan says that's what marketing is and selling is that you're helping people get intellectually interested or stimulated and emotionally committed to making a decision. And so this is just all part of training their identity. And really what the context is that you're creating is their future self. You're creating a context that they already want. It's their future self. And so they're coming at it from that perspective. And so these are all just things that I say in a lot kind of quicker stream in that seven minute video. And so over a six, this was without it over a six month period of time. And it's a very similar funnel. I made that much money on a phone funnel selling a particular online course by just adding, and these are two separate webinars. But by adding the $7 offer, so you can see the $7 offer and then the thing down below it. I've actually sold probably 4 or 5,000 of the journaling course, which is $7. But what happened is that the conversion rate of the actual thing I'm selling, which is an online course, between 500 and $1,000. That conversion rate almost doubled on the sales page. Because you can test the sales page, you can see how much people when they land on a sales page. So before the sales page conversion rate was 7%. That was the first picture I showed you the conversion rate on the same sales page. Essentially a little tweaks, but not really is now 12%. Actually no, it's 15%. So the conversion rate on the sales page doubled by adding in this pre suasion component. And it happened for a few reasons. One is because far more of the people who are at the webinar now actually paid to be at the webinar. Thousands of people have now paid $7 to watch the webinar that used to be free. Those people are far more likely to buy the program. But also for me, who's someone who wanted to give material that was useful, I wanted them to have the right perspective. I wanted them to have the right perspective, the right lenses, so that when they watched the webinar, it was a transformational experience. Not just them consuming more information. This is the sales page pretty much the same thing as it was before. Another kind of very important principle that I've learned about pre suasion, that this is something that has fundamentally improved the program. So I've had thousands of people go through this online program that I sell. It's a year long experience. And one of the things that I've learned after having thousands of people go through it is that a lot of people, I actually have far lower like refund rates than typical. But when people join a program like mine, and even if they join Genius Network, there's a lot of new information that they have to gather in order to be successful in that new environment. So when I give them this new online course, a lot of the feedback we got was that people felt overwhelmed. People were like, there's so much information, I don't know if I can apply it all. And so what we then did is we built an onboarding program. So my program's called amp. And so what we did is we designed an AMP warm up program. There's about 300 people in it right now. And actually a lot of the former people who have been in AMP for like six months who are floundering, we put them back in this program. And essentially what this onboarding prep program is is there's a video at the beginning and I say this is after they've bought my program. I say, you actually can't have access to my program or not my program, but you can't have access to AMP what you purchased until after you go through this prep program. This is a buffer. And essentially I explained to them the core mindsets, the core things that they need to understand in order to be successful with the thing that they just bought. And they actually have to accomplish a few requirements in order to actually get access to what they bought. And by doing this, by creating this amp warm up program, and it's essentially like a buffer. Our refunds are so low, but people are so happy because when they walk in, they're no longer overwhelmed. They can take this program at whatever pace they want. And that's one thing I tell them about. You take this at whatever pace you want. The fastest you can do it is in two weeks, if you're really a rock star. And then once people actually get into the program that they bought, they have such better results, not only because they worked for it, but because now they're ready for it. They've got the right mindset for it. They actually know how to do it rather than just jumping onto a rocket ship. So this is the thing that me and Joe actually have been working on. Joe filmed an onboarding process. He spent three hours filming some of the most amazing stuff, helping people to, when they join Genius Network, prep their mindset so that once they come to these meetings, they know exactly how to execute at the highest level. So I'm now going to finish. But These are the two pictures. 7% versus 15%. The difference was persuasion.

Elko will show you exactly, step by step, how to build your own army of powerful influencers. Elko's title is how to build an army of influencers to promote your products. Please join me in welcoming Elko.

Thank you, Tim. So today I'm going to talk about how to build an army of influencers. So in this picture, you'll see a lot of people that I have no clue who they are, but they all have one thing in common as they're holding up my book. And this is my Dutch book that I'm selling. I've been selling this book for over eight years, and we've seen a big growth in sales in the last couple of months simply because we started using this technique that I'm going to share with you today. So how does it work? How can you get an army of influencers promoting your book or your product, your offer, whatever it is that you want to offer? Well, it's very simple. What you do is you pay influencers to post about your offer. And this is a book, in my case. So let me see. So. And that's it. You just pay people to promote your product, and that's about it. So why would you want to do that? Well, first of all, you can have very fast growth if you have other people, other influencers. So an influencer could be somebody on Instagram with a large following or not even that big of a following, and they start Promoting your book. They put a post or maybe a story where they talk about your book and then they say like swipe up to get the book. Works very well. So you have fast go growth, you have a lot of social proof. So I get a lot of messages from people that I know that send me screenshots of other people that are promoting my book. And again, I don't have a clue who these people are. I'm going to talk about how it comes that I don't have a clue. So what you're going to have is you have a lot of messages from people that say, like, hey, everybody is talking about your book because from a lot of different influencer, they're promoting your product versus hey man, I see your ads all the time. So also it's very profitable. If you do it well, it could be way cheaper than normal ads and for example, Facebook ads or YouTube ads or stuff like that. So how do you do that? How do you have an army of influencers? Step number one, and I will send all of you guys the step by step plan. I'll send it to Eunice and she'll send it to all of you guys. So but step number one is slide in the dm. The DM is a direct messaging system of Instagram. And it's very simple. You ask for their physical address. So you tell them, okay, I got a free gift and can we surprise you with a free gift free of charge? Step number two, and very important before you go to step number two, even before you go to step number one, is who not how. So I said, I have no clue who all these people are. The whole strategy that I'm explaining to you right now, I have not invested any hours of my personal time in it. It's just one person in my team, actually two people in my team that are consistently doing these steps. So it's not my hours and as we all know who not how is the way to grow. So if you want to apply this step by step system, I would advise you not to do it yourself, but have somebody that you can trust to do this and then it can be very profitable. Step number two, first you ask for the address. Step number two is you send the book for free. And you don't charge shipping costs. You just send them the book or your product or whatever it is that you have for free. Step number three oftentimes, and that's a bonus, that's not step number three, but it's a bonus oftentimes when they get your book for free. Or your product for free. They already posted on their social media. Not all of them, a lot of them don't, but a lot of them do as well. So they, that's a free promotion. But that's not even, not even the goal of this step by step plan. Step number 3A. Sometimes they receive, they respond like, hey man, thank you for the book. That's amazing. And then you respond to their message after they receive the book and you ask if they are open for a paid promo. So you send the book, then they reply on DM like, hey, I got your book. It's amazing. Thank you so much. And then you reply and ask them if they want to promote it to their following as a paid promotion. So you just pay them. Or step number 3B is if they don't respond after they got the book, if they don't out of themselves respond, you just follow up, say, hey, I think you got the package. Did you get it in good order? And what do you think of it? So that's step number 3B. And then you just ask them like, hey man, can we do a paid promotion? And what you then do? If the price is right, you agree. You don't negotiate, but you agree. You never negotiate on the price. You just agree or you don't agree. You're like, okay, it's too much, but thank you so much. So what you see in this image as well is I'll just say like, all right, let's go for it. We're easy partners.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Step number five is pay them fast. So if they say like, yeah, it's a hundred bucks or it's 500 bucks or whatever, if they send the Invoice pay within 24 hours, they love it. They'll be like, wow, you're the best partner that we ever had. And then they start promoting it on their Instagram in this case. And then what you have to do is track the sales. So for example, you pay 500 bucks, they start promoting and they see like, hey man, we only got like 14 sales of a book, or we got like 140 sales of the book. That's when you see when you have a winner or not so is it a winner? Is it a winner? For example, in this case, I don't even know, but we might have paid like 500 bucks for this promotion. And you see, these are book sales and this is all within one hour. And this is within one hour. So probably we had like over 100 book sales just from this one promotion. We paid 500 bucks, which means that we only paid like five, five dollars per book that we sold. So that's a winner. And if it's a winner, what you're going to do when you have a winner is you schedule another promotion. And this is the goal of this step by step system is when you have an influencer that has a really good engagement with his or her audience and he or she gets a lot of results for you, then you schedule another promo, let's say other month, the next month, and another promo, and another one, and another one because they are gold for you. They are like your sales reps, but they're way more effective because they can close in larger amounts and they're oftentimes pretty cheap. So with this whole system, this is my long term vision. I want to build an army of influencers that are happy to get paid and happy to promote at any time. So at any time that I want to send out a promo for a new product, a new course, a new webinar, new offer, a new opt in page, whatever it is, we send them an email and they promote to their following and boom, we have omnipresence for years to come. So I want to build an army for years to come. So reasons why I like this. First of all, it cost me zero hours of my time because I have a who and I have a system. And this is extremely scalable as well. There's almost no technical stuff, no ad accounts, no click through rates, no nothing. It's just very basic, but it works very well. There's consistent traction around my brand simply because all of these influencers keep on posting about this guy with his book and he's amazing. And of course they know the right words to say because we teach them what to say. This is not depending on algorithms, Facebook or Google policy, or you know, when you're ever your Facebook account is banned or your Google account is banned, doesn't matter. This is your own assets, like your partners are your assets. You'll have consistent sales. So whenever you do this and you do it well, you have consistent sales. So let's say you have a new influencer every day that promotes the book, it keeps on Going and going and going. There's no need to ask for a favor. So you know, you can also work with other people like JV or affiliates, but it's asking for a favor. I'm very bad at asking for favors and I oftentimes don't like to return the favor if I'm not a big fan of like what they're offering or whatever. But now they can just promote me and we just pay them. It's very good for your follower growth. As you see, they always not just promoting the book, but also promoting my brand. So my ad ilkedebour handle, it's growth on demand. Like you just send them a message and they'll promote for you and then you have growth on demand. There's unlimited potential. This is just in Holland and we just been doing this for like two months. The potential of this is crazy. And again, this is just Holland. Like it's super small, but it's been super effective already. So I got some bonus tips for you. Bonus tip number one is you got Instagram posts. So in the timeline of somebody on Instagram, but you also have Instagram stories. And stories is where they can say swipe up and stories, they work much better than Instagram posts. So we have much better results. If people promote on their stories and they oftentimes would like to promote on stories, they prefer to promote on stories as well. So that's a good thing. Bonus tip. So that's the difference between a post and a story. On the left you see a post which is good, but on the right you see a story and then they can swipe up which is even better. Bonus tip number two is give influencers clear instructions but challenge them to be creative. So I have an audio you see at the right. You see I made a little audio of a couple of minutes where I explain to them what I like to see whenever they're promoting. And so I give them a three step thing. So step number one is that they're in screen and they're having my book in their hands and then they talk a little bit about what impact I made on them or the book made on them. And then they talk about the reason why people can get the book now for free. It's because there's some spelling mistakes in the book and then they need to say swipe up. So I got a simple three step plan and most of them they follow it and converts very well. Bonus tip number three is give your who the permission to close deals. So I told my who. So I have Two, who's who are doing this? I told them like you decide on the deals. I mean if it's really large deals, like a thousand euros and up, or 2 or 3 or €4,000 and up, just ask for permission from me. But anything up to a thousand bucks, you decide to close the deal and I'll get the invoice and I'll pay the invoice and afterwards we'll start, we will see if it worked, yes or no. So this is how you learn quickly. So I just trust, but I verify afterwards if they are great deals. Bonus tip number four. Very important something that a lot of people don't see and don't think about is you got micro influencers. So for example, people with 8 to 80,000 followers on Instagram, you also got like the bigger influencers, like 100 plus thousand followers on Instagram. We noticed that the micro influencers have way better engagement with their following. Very good results. They tend to want to work harder for you, so they have better promotions. They're more happy with a promotion because they're smaller and they're way, way cheaper. So let's say somebody with like 10,000 followers is not 10 times cheaper than somebody with 100,000 followers. It's oftentimes like, like 20 times cheaper. But the results are like way bigger compared to the amount of followers. Bonus tip number five, think outside of your target market. So this is a famous Dutch guy, he's a hip hop artist and this is crazy. Like he has a good amount of following, like 50 or 60,000 people. And on the left, so on the right you see him with my book. And on the left he says, and this is Dutch again because I didn't have the time to translate. But he says, I just smoked a big fat blunt and I've been thinking. And then he starts to pitch me, so. Which is very funny. This is outside of my target market. My target market is not potheads, not people who smoke a lot of weed. But he has a big following and they really love him. He has good vibes and a lot of people based on his promotion started buying the book. And he already promoted twice for us. So he's a great partner. The crazy thing is again, he only charged 100 bucks. 100 bucks and he got like 50 or 60,000 followers. Bonus tip number seven, use a second Instagram account for your who so you keep your personal Instagram Instagram account safe. So I don't want to communicate from my name when it's not from me personally. So we have a Second account, which is on the right, the Winston account. And so my who's on that account. And they, they target people, they send them DMs and they talk about me, but it's not from my personal account. So. So they're not in my account, they don't see my DMs, all that stuff. And so that's, that's much better. So that's bonus tip number six. So in closing, why would you want to build an army of influencers and why could it be an amazing growth strategy for all of us? It's genius network. Well, if you build an army of influencers that are happy to get paid and happy to promote at any time for years to come, you will have amazing results. It costs literally zero hours of your time. If you have a who. There's almost no technical stuff. You will have consistent traction around your brand. It's not depending on algorithms or Facebook or Google policies or bands or all of that stuff. You will have consistent sales. No need to ask for a favor because you simply pay them. You'll have a lot of follower growth because they're mentioning your name. As you see here, there's growth on demand. So anytime you want to grow, have them promote your product or your offer. There's unlimited potential. And again, this is just Holland. Imagine going bigger. So there is so much gold out there, you just have to be willing to big it up or have some who's that can pick it up for you.

Okay, so I will just admit right up front, 10 minutes has got me nervous. I don't do nervous on stage, but here I am. Okay, so let's see what are we at? Let's try this one. Okay. Yeah. The next half billion dollars in launches. So you ever notice when Apple launches a product and people just, you're anticipating that you're excited about that. The market's just talking about it and everyone's just, they're counting down. It's all about anticipation. It's when is that product going to get released? People line up outside the stores, right? This guy, first in line for iPhone 5. Woo hoo. You know, put that on his gravestone, you know. But they had these lines outside of the Apple stores, you know. You ever noticed how I am an Internet marketer, I sell stuff online. Sometimes servers crash. Well, the iPhone, I think it was the 4. The Apple site crashed. I'm like, okay, if Apple's site can crash, my site can crash. I'm good with that. But they do. What do they do? They do tens, hundreds of millions of dollars immediately, right off the bat from, you know, from 0 to 100 miles an hour right away. So I've wondered, how can we do that? How can we do that in this room? We don't have those resources. We don't have their branding, we don't have their advertising, we don't have their teams. How can we do that? So for 18 years I've been working on how we can do it, but actually, that's bullshit. Because 18 years ago, I was a stay at home dad and I was like, I was just desperate to make some kind of money to try to impact my family in some way. So I started publishing. I started publishing online. This is 1996. So back then, my first email went out to everyone I knew with an email address that was like 17 people. But it gradually grew from there. And I grew this platform. Okay, I grew this platform. Anyone out here have a platform? You've got an email list, you've got a social media following. Are you guys just not willing to raise your arms or what? Thank you. Okay. So I gradually built up this platform. I did what they now call content marketing. So I published. And then I got to this point, well, maybe I can actually sell something to these people. But I was actually. We have born closers. We got closers in the room. Raise your hand proudly if you're a closer. So we've got some closers, right? You guys know what I'm talking about. You know how to sell. Unfortunately, I'm not one of you. I don't have that sales gene. So I had this little platform that was growing up, and I was like, how can I sell something to them? And I was terrified. I was actually terrified to ask for the order. I was terrified to ask for the order. So. And that actually, that little thing allowed me to sort of to invent this process that has made all the difference. Because what I did was I romanced my people, I romanced my followers, and then I asked for the sale. I built relationship first. And even for the closers out there, you all do that, right? You all build relationship. But now in this day and age, we're able to do that in a way we never could before. We have the speed of communication, interactivity that we've never had before. So I tweaked this, and I tweaked this. I did my first launch, some of you heard the story, that did $1,650. That was enough to make me do backflips. $1,650 changed everything with that first launch. But then I got better. I instantly knew I could get better at it. And I did get better. And I got better. Here's a photo. I put this in a book, but I've never really made this one public. That's actually me. I am at my kitchen table and I'm in a bathrobe. And this was not staged. This is actually when I did a launch. This is the first six figure launch I did. It was $106,000 in a single week. I did, I think, like I was sitting there for an hour, you know, we did 28,000 in sales. And this is. That was like unbelievable, life changing money for me. So I gradually got better and better and better. And then in 2005, I started teaching it. And my students and clients have now done $500 million in sales. In fact, it's way beyond that. But that's the number I feel safe seeing public. You know, I've got clients that have done tens and even one that's done 100 million in sales. So what I wanted to share with you is based through what I've learned. And you know, it's funny, cause I was thinking about like, I did just roll out this book. Okay, there it is. In fact, there's a book. It's in all your bags. I bought one for each of you and we rolled that thing out. And I was talking to Paula Colligan and he's like, yeah, dude, I think the title of your talk, you should just go up there and say, this shit works. Because I came in, I was a completely unknown author, and boom, it was like up to number one. In fact, what happened was the first week the New York Times decided not to put me on the list, even though I had the sales. And so then we doubled down and I had several conversations with my good friend Brendan Bouchard and came up with a strategy how we were going to come back and sell even more the next week. And then we were able to put it up to number one. There's the proofs in the pudding. That was a screenshot. I got to print that one out and put it on the wall. So how do you do this? It all comes down to three things. Sequences, stories and triggers. And so sequences. You can't ever. There's so much noise in the market now that to gather someone's attention, you have to put your material into a sequence that tells your story. Then your story just. It's almost like what I call a sideways sales letter. We used to have These long form sales letters and they worked really, really well. Now they don't work as well. So I took that 10 page sales letter, I turned it sideways into a 10 day process and now you do very much the same thing you do in a sales letter, but now you do it over a series of pre launch content of value videos. We typically do this now with videos that build over time. And then the triggers are simply things like we all use all the time. Authority, reciprocity, scarcity. And in those three videos they allow you to deploy those triggers and you build up this anticipation just the way Apple does. And you get this situation where people are like they cannot wait to buy. They absolutely cannot wait to buy. So you want to know how you want to, you know, this is obviously very, very compressed what I just gave you. That, that's normally the first two and a half days of my three day event. So do you, Anyone want. In three minutes, anyone want to see that sequence for the book? Because the book was, is a little bit different. And are they. Can we put this on camera? So what we did was we had an offer for the book and basically we were selling it for $7. It was actually free with shipping and handling. Okay, so we give the book away for seven bucks. So we're going to put a B here for the book. Someone comes in to buy and they get an instant upsell. Okay, so this is a one time offer, OTO. And this is for $197. Okay. I would have liked to say I got 8 or 10% conversion, but we got about a 7% conversion on that. Okay, but at a $200 product, that means that everyone coming in and getting a free book is worth 14 bucks right off the bat. Now the key here, the really important thing is that in doing this it allows you to incentivize partners to mail for you. Because all of a sudden I can pay commissions and I got to give a shout out. Brendon Burchard is the one. Brendan in 2011, I think bought my product and he's taken it and did really well. But then he morphed it and he came up with this process. So Basically, book for $7 to upsell for $197. And then either way, whether they take the upsell or not, then they go into my PLF port product and that's at 1997. And the conversion for there is around 1.7%. You can do the math on that. But it comes out pretty well. But what we do is basically now I've got partners, lots and lots of partners driving into the book, driving traffic into the book, saying hey, go check out Jeff's book and get it free with shipping and handling for 7 bucks, 10 bucks they'll ship it anywhere in the world. If you're outside the U.S. i'm able to pay partners on commission on this one click upsell. And I'm also paying them commission down here. Boy, that writing is nothing like a time deadline to take your writing all to hell. But in any case, that's how I sold 41,000 books in just a couple weeks time frame. That's how we put it on number one in New York Times bestseller list. So remember, you're marketing. Joe talked about this in his little, in his little introduction. Your marketing has to tell a story. Nothing captures people's attention like a story does. Stories win. And when you deploy that story over a 10 day timeframe and you give three great value videos that define the opportunity, define the journey, define how your prospects lives are going to transform. Then when you land them on your sales video, they don't even need to watch that entire sales video, they are.

Ready to buy in the next 540 seconds. I'm going to talk to you about some ideas, concepts, philosophies, tools that can help you prepare for excellence even when you're already very successful. My definition of success, okay. Having a predetermined plan, successfully carrying it out over a long period of time and having a damn good time doing it. Damn good time doing it. So idea number one. Okay? Dig your well before you're thirsty. My father headed the associate press for 35 years. Jack McKay got a hold of me age 18. Harvey, every person you meet the rest of your life goes in the Rolodex file computer today. All right? Then a little bit about them on the back of the card. Now here's the key. Find the creative. Find the creative way to keep in touch. Now that's what I've been doing ever since I was age 18 years old. I'd like to talk about publishing for a moment. Back in the late 80s I have a manuscript, Swim of the Sharks out being eaten alive. William Moore and company, one of the biggest seven in the world at the time publishing had three meetings with them. Now remember, a first time unknown author, which I am, okay, from the flyover state of Minnesota, wants to get published. Tom Peters in Search of Excellence 10,000 books unknown. First time author, Ken Blanchard, 7,500 books unknown. Okay, at the time I got the CEO, got the President, VP, National Sales. 45 minutes into the meeting, I asked for the order. I said, I'd like you to seriously consider printing 100,000 hardcover copies. Swim with the sharks on the 37th floor. They told me to jump VP National Sales closes his books. Thank you very much, Mr. McKay. Obviously you're not going to get together. And he screams at me, who are you? Come in here and ask for 100,000. We never print more than 10,000. First time, unknown author. I brought in two humongous briefcases into the conference room boardroom. Then took out, put them on the table, two huge Rolodex files. 6,500 names since my father got ahold of me. Age 18 started to go through the list. Here's Pillsbury. 18,000 employees. Know a little bit about them, their customers. Maybe they'll read the book. Maybe they'll pass it around. Here's General Mills, 23,000 employees. Maybe they'll read the book. Pass it along. Here's Honeywell, 30,000 employees. Go to the next Rolodex file. Do business in five companies. There's France, Germany, Spain. All right, maybe it'll be an international bestseller. Three weeks and three meetings later, they published 100,000 hardcover copies from the Sharks. Did I know when I was 18 that I'd be writing a book? Do any of you know? Okay, Any of you know where your contacts are going to come from?

No.

So we dig our well before we're thirsty. Next. 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 15 years. You have no idea. It's nice to hear speakers, but trust me, as long as you live, person on your left, person on your right. Person in front of you. Person behind you. Way more important, over a period of a lifetime, keep that antenna without question. Now, this is Swim with the Sharks. You don't have to look at it all. You all got a copy? Please do me a favor. When you get home, on the airplane, whatever. Do not read this book. Study it, underline it, highlight it, post it notes, rough it up. Not only my book, self help book, but all the wonderful books that you have in the duffel bag. One more very quick aside. World War Three, again with my publisher. I want to be the first. In the late 80s, money back guarantee if you like. If you don't like. Swim with the Sharks. Four week fight. I prevailed. Five million copies sold. Eighteen people asked for their money back. Seven of them were my best friends. Next idea. Start every day with a healthy dose of vitamin C. Creativity. Zip. Zero. None. No correlation between creativity and iq. Every single person in this room can be Way more creative than you ever, ever dreamed about. Without question. Creativity? No. No correlation between the two. Let me give you an example, if I can. All right, let me go back to. Let me talk about Larry King for a minute first. I'm lucky he's a friend. Been on a show, called couple times, got a book. Okay. Did you'd. Well before youe Thursday. Picked up the phone years ago. Called Larry and said, larry, you know, might I be able to get on your show again? I just wrote a book, Dig youg well before youe Thursday. You think it's got merit? He said, are you going to be in New York on Thursday? I lied. I said, yes. I said, I'll see you at the Ritz Carlton Hotel where he always has dinner. 6:30. Hang up the phone. Ironically, there is a newspaper right there. USA Today. I'd love it. King's got a column. Fifteen years. He met the champ Muhammad Ali at the Academy Awards. Here's verbatim what he said in that article. Biggest thrill of my life. Couldn't sleep last night. Chills running up and down my spine. I immediately faxed that to the Champ. I call him the champ. Muhammad. 88 acre estate, Berrien Springs, Michigan. FYI, they called back, why could I do that? I interviewed him for 10 hours. We became fast friends. They called back, hey, thanks. Thanks very much. We live in the sticks. Love the article. Hey, Champ. Lonnie, his wife. I'll greet Larry for you having dinner with him Thursday night in New York City. They said they're going to be in New York City. Oh, please. I begged them. Persistence, they said. Okay, get there half hour early. Six o'.

Clock. Fine.

Six o'.

Clock.

Lonnie. Champ, myself. Back to the door. In comes King. Probably not looking forward to having dinner with me. Sees the Champ. No exaggeration. Bear hug left. Bear hug right. Left cheek. Right cheek. Forehead on the lips, as I recall. And then he's got springs in his mouth. 45 minutes. Zaire Thriller from Manila. Angelo Dundee. He loves boxing. 45 minutes into dinner, a very nice looking woman came up with a pen and paper in her hand. Saw King, champ, myself. Oh, Mr. McKee, I've read all of your books. Can I have your autograph? King went nuts. Name was Marilyn. Sign a little note. She starts to walk away. King gets up, says, ma', am, would you please come back here? She heard that. She comes back there.

Don't you know who this is? It's Muhammad Ali.

Don't you want his autograph? Looked at Larry and said, larry, you bitted hook, line and sinker. I paid her 50 bucks an hour ago to come and ask for my autograph, which I did. She was a catering manager. Catering manager, Ritz Carlton. Got there a half hour early. Set it up, champ. Gives me five. Give me. Harvey. Boy, oh, boy. This is really something. All right, but I got on the show again. Moral? Don't be boring. Don't be predictable. All right. Think hardest, most valuable task any person performs. Next idea. All right. If Joe Pollard said, harvey, you got three minutes, that's it. Good luck, kid. All right, well. And here's the three minutes. Head and shoulders above the rest. People don't care how much you know about them once they realize how much you care about them. Now, we've invented a new product at McKay Envelope Company 66. Question customer profile. We require all of our salespeople to fill out. You wouldn't believe how much we know about our customers. IRS wouldn't believe how much we know about our customers. I'm not talking about their taste in envelopes either. We don't know based on routine conversation, observation, what. What a customer is like as a human being. What he or she feels strongly about, what he's most proud of having achieved. Any status symbols in his or her offices. In other words, want to know what turns that customer client on? At a customer in New York City last week. Just got home late last night. Now, before I went in there, there's no cold calls at our company for 50 years. No cold call. We prepare to win. We do our homework. We make out the 60 as best as we can. We add to it as we call into those people. Here's what I knew about the buyer. I wanted to sell him some. Well, it's obvious. He graduated from Notre Dame, mba, as I recall, from usc. Married his high school sweetheart. They have three children. She works for a pharmacy company. He loves the Cubs. Loves to play golf. October 24th was his birthday. June 26th was our anniversary. What's the probability I will sell this customer over a long period of time? You're doggone right. It's almost 100%. If I don't want any of this going in, I'll read the desk, I'll read the walls. Very, very important. Oprah Winfrey. I got a big break. Okay. Five minutes on her program. Five minutes. Prepared to win 66. Found out everything. Did my homework, got on the program, mentioned 4, 5, 6, 7 things I knew 25 before going in. She kept me on for one hour. One hour, trying to add value to her life, as you all know, which Joe talked about just 20 minutes ago. So really truly important. Sold 50,000 hardcover books. 50,000. You can't know enough, okay, in one week. Can't know enough. No possible way enough about your customers, your clients, your competitors, your audiences, your suppliers, your employees. Example. Al, okay, gets a phone call. Al gets a phone call from Harold. Hey, coming to Rotary tomorrow. Al says, yeah, I'll be there. He's got a problem. My guest speaker just canceled. Al says, hey, okay, I might be able to fill in. Harold says, what might you talk about? I don't know. I'll talk about sex. Fine. Next day, 45 minute speech, standing ovation. Al comes home, his wife says, hey, I don't understand. What'd you talk about? Now, he's smart enough to know that his wife thinks he doesn't know anything about sexual. So he says, skiing. Oh, she says, I see skiing. Next day, there's Harold's wife in the supermarket. There's Al's wife an aisle away. Harold's wife hollers out, hey, talk to my husband. Heard your husband gave a great speech at Rotary. He must be terrific. And she says, I don't understand. He's only done it once and his hat blew off. And in closing, always act like. Like your mother is watching. I want to talk about ethics for a few minutes. There's been a consistent, gradual decline in the ethical business practices in the United States for the last 50 years. And it's reached new extremes lately. Virtually every institution that can be measured, from congressmen to senators to state and local politicians, to religious institutions, to business leaders, to people, to cheating in college, to athletes, on and on and on. So here's an example of ethics if I can share with you. Mother was invited for dinner at her son Brian's apartment. During the course of the meal, Brian's mother couldn't help but notice how beautiful Brian's roommate Jennifer was. Brian's mom in law and suspected a relationship between Brian and Jennifer. Over the course of the evening, while watching the two interact, she started to wonder if there was more between them. Met the eye. Reading his mom's thoughts, Brian volunteered, I know what you must be thinking, but I assure you Jennifer and I are just roommates. About a week later, Jennifer came to Brian saying, ever since your mother came to dinner, I've been unable to find that beautiful silver gravy ladle. You don't suppose she took it, do you? Well, I doubt it, Brian said, but I'll send her an email just to be sure. So I wrote, dear Mom, I'm not saying that you did take the gravy ladle from the house. I'm not saying that you did not take the the gravy ladle, but the fact remains that one has been missing ever since you were here for dinner. Love, Brian. Several days later, Brian received an email back from his mother. Dear son, I'm not saying that you do sleep with Jennifer. I'm not saying that you do not sleep with Jennifer. But the fact remains that if Jennifer had been sleeping in her own bed, she would have found the ladle by now. McKay's moral, if you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters.

Brian Kurtz I've known for almost 20 years, and you have done all kinds of things, including running, you know, the awesome company Boardroom Inc. With which was founded by the late Marty Edelston, who was a direct marketing, direct mail genius, as are you. And of course I started in direct marketing and direct mail. First learned about it in 1992. Before the Internet existed as a sales platform. I used direct mail and advertising and many forms of offline marketing to build and grow my business. First as a dead row carpet company cleaner who used marketing to transform my small company. And then I fell in love with marketing and then I started teaching it to other carpet cleaners. Well, I used to come out here for the boot camps, which was just incredible. I mean, you were teaching them gold. These are carpet cleaners from all over the country and you're teaching them basic direct response techniques. Them being able to market at a level that world class marketers were doing in all other industries. And the carpet cleaners were lucky because they got you. And I used to be amazed being there.

Yeah.

And I mean, when you came out to talk to the cleaners, you were pretty awesome. You've always been great. I love talking to them because they were just so hungry for this information. And I remember, I just remember the first time I came out, you gave them a book. It was like this thick and it had, it was basically a how to be. How to be, not how to be a carpet cleaner. How to be a direct response maven. And it was, you know, the sample ads and you were basically teaching them basic direct marketing and basic direct response. And a lot of it was direct mail. I mean, back then, right? No, and it still is. And what I've always said to people too is because anyone that's not in that industry, because, you know, now in Genius Network, I mean, you're part of the group, we have, you know, we have people, we have a billionaire in the group. We have people running, you know, 100 million to 500 million dollar companies. We've got about 15 people in the group that do that. So what I've always told people is that if I can figure out how to successfully sell carpet cleaning services using direct mail and direct marketing and you've got anything even remotely more exciting, anyone could use it. Because what first comes up is a negative for some people saying, oh, that won't apply to me because I'm not in that business. Soon realizes if you frame it properly that this applies to. We talk all the time about, you know, I spend a lot of time now at conferences of quote unquote, Internet marketers. And it just blows me away that anybody would want to define themselves by a channel.

Right.

You know, we used to look at ourselves as direct marketers. Direct mail was a channel, space was a channel. When email came out, you know, that was a channel. Direct response television, all of those are channels. And to not use everything at your disposal, you're not really doing justice to being the kind of world class marketers that you and I are and the people that we like to hang around with. Well, let's talk about for people that don't know who you are because you've never positioned yourself as a guru. You don't go out there and you always downplay the knowledge that you have. But you've mailed how many letters do you think? You know, I tried to like estimate recently and I put it into some bio stuff now because it took me a long time to count it all because it was 1.3 billion pieces of direct mail and it was only over the last 20 years and only over the last year. Only over the last 20 years. So I don't know what the total number would be. And of course I didn't lick every stamp and I didn't put every piece in the mail, but I was overseeing that kind of volume over a long period of time with an incredible staff of people who really understood the intricacies of, of how to do direct mail. And it's not just direct, it's database marketing. The thing that's been so fascinating to me in the Internet world is that we have a database of 9 million people on our database of people who bought something from us over the last 20, 25 years. And I tell people if they have a 9,000 name list or a 900 name list, to not look at that audience and think about what, what's on that list and what they bought, how they bought, how much they bought, and all the basics of direct marketing, which is what we call rfm, recency, frequency, monetary, which we can talk about if you want.

Yeah, we're going to.

I'm going to make a little note of that.

Yeah.

But I think that all of those things still apply, even it's not just because we had a big database. So, yeah, I can brag, as you say. It's not bragging if you've done it, but I think John Wayne said that or something. I thought Joe Polish said that. Well, you can credit me and make me look better. But no, I definitely was not the first to say that. Yeah, it's a good. And the thing is, it's not bragging to say, you know, you mail 1.3 billion pieces of mail. What's really exciting is that we actually were targeting customers in a way that enabled us to mail that many names at an acceptable profit and loss because of the way we selected our list, the way we did our creative, the way that we looked at the whole process, which, you know, you can be a lot sloppier today. Right. I mean, the quote is. The quote that I like today is 75 cent. Marketing deserves $500 per thousand thinking. So 75 cents, we'll say it's the average cost for an email. For an email, or I guess the sent email is about, I don't know, 50 to 75 cents a thousand. So I don't know, I use 75 cents. Maybe I'm overpaying. I better go check my vendors.

It could be.

Yeah, but $500 1,000 is, you know, a rate that you would pay with postage and printing. And, you know, we do magalogs and all kinds of different formats in direct mail. And if you're spending $500 per thousand to do your marketing, you better be thinking carefully about before you put anything in the mail. And I think that there's just a lot of haphazard marketing going on because email is cheap and anybody can get into business. The Internet, the beauty of the Internet is that the cost of entry is low. The bad news about the Internet is the cost of entry is low. So people can be very sloppy. They don't think through everything. Exactly. They think because it's free, it's really free. When in reality, what you're saying, if you put some serious thinking into the offer, that's everything, everything, then the returns could be 10 times greater. Well, Gordon Grossman was one of my gurus. He built reader's digestion. And he used to always say that in direct mail that when you mailed a certain segment of your list, that if it was a bad offer and the wrong select those names, not to say that they're not going to respond next time to something else, but you've now kind of, you've kind of made them. The possibility would be that they might not respond as well next time to the next offer. And I don't think, you know, the online marketers think that way about the, the attrition of their lists. And I came out of the list business too. That's really where I started. So going back to my history, it was more about the audience and the list. And I just love the idea that you have this list of. There are no unique names, only unique lists. And so the assembly of that list. And online marketers have figured this out on steroids, right? I mean, knowing that they've developed this tribe and they can give them so much good content before they really sell them something, those are the guys that are doing it, right? The ones that are just bashing their list all the time. They're not using that $500 per thousand thinking. And not only that, they have no interest in doing direct mail either, which is kind of like what you and I want to be out there talking about and saying, you know what, you could use direct mail even though you've never used it before. Well, my hope would be that anyone watching this, listening to this, would become interested, intrigued enough to realize there is a ton of gold within their existing database, within their sphere of influence, within their affiliates. If they're an affiliate. There's a tremendous amount of untapped gold that most people, people aren't even aware that they could mine for it because they don't even know this mining methodology. It's like handing someone a shovel that can, you know, or a pick that can dig up gold, but they don't even use it. What are some strategies and tactics business owners should be thinking about using to bring in cash, like right now? Well, there's a lot of different ways. One of them is most people don't think about barter. I've set up lots of things for people, but if you have something you can create or you own that you have margin in, or it's sunk cost and you. And it has, it has value to anybody and you can exchange it for anything that can either be cash converted, used in lieu of what you buy, or there's another word I don't want to get too sophisticated triangulated. You can, we've done, geez, I've done 50, $60 billion million dollars, excuse me, of barter. And I could tell you some great barter stories the other. I've been to your house, you have a lot of art and shit there that you've bartered over the years. I mean this is, I mean truthfully, I drive a gt. I got a GTS Mercedes I traded a day for. I got a. And I'm saying this just to demonstrate not to be arrogant. I've got a, a G Wagon, 63AMG. I traded two days for. Christy has a Porsche. We traded for, you know, my whole backyard I traded for. But it's understanding value perception. If you have something that you have in oversupply expertise, for example, and that expertise has high perceived value and you can exchange it to somebody that you can, you can demonstrate needs it or needs the not it because you're not really selling the expertise, you're selling the result, the saving, the money, the productivity, whatever it's going to be worth. And you can get anything. We used to do with car dealership just as an example, we would create barter profit centers. And I'll go through real quick because it's pretty cool. We would basically look at. And most people don't know it. If you have car dealers there, they know it. It's a very huge amount of volume that goes through not just volume of cars, but just buying, purchasing, you know, tens, hundreds of millions of dollars. We would go through everything they were buying. Got to keep my eyes focused on the camera. And then we would see what we could trade for instead of purchasing. But when you're trading, you can trade soft for hard on different multiples. And I don't want to get too sophisticated, but we would trade a car for two or three times the value in something else that we would normally pay cash for. So let's say we were going to buy chemicals and we needed cleaning chemicals or lubricating chemicals, we would go to that company and we trade them either automobiles that normally would have, let's call it a 15% margin or less, but we would trade it 2 or 3 to 1. So we would get margins of something like literally 60, 70% to our advantage for something we would normally write a check for. We would also trade for things I could liquidate on the open market for a multiple, excuse me, for a higher margin. You can trade. I don't want to get too sophisticated. You can JV with people again if you have Anything that you sell, you should ask, what else do people buy right now? Before, during, after. Instead, if it's still being purchased, then the next level is what else are my buyers buying? And if they're buying it from people they don't know and they're just basically trying to find them anyhow. This goes back to relationships, Joe. You have the ability with the trust, the credibility that has been very hard won by the years you've served your clients or the value you brought your clients. If it wasn't yours to say, look, this is. And by the way, I have a concept that's called the Aikido school of marketing. And the essence, anybody that knows what Aikido is, it's the martial arts methodology that uses the power of the enemy against the enemy. If you use the problem to your advantage, you could say, look, it's a little unusual for me to be introducing you to blank, but I know that you're going to be purchasing or using these services or products now, and you probably don't know who to trust. We've built a very strong relationship where hopefully you trust us and our judgment. We've done a very, very comprehensive job and we've found what we think are the best providers. We've negotiated in behalf of all of our clients. A preferential price, extra terms, guarantees, bonuses. And if you don't know who to trust, we would like to very strongly recommend this. You can choose anybody you want, but we're also ombudsman. You can do things like that all day long. And I hope I'm not getting too rogue on you.

No.

You know what I. What I like about what you just said? When I was a carpet cleaner back in 1990, one of the ways I came up with a free room of carpet cleaning was I heard a one of your I don't know how many thousands of dollars. You were the most expensive seminar guy in the world back in the 90s. When I first started listening to your stuff, I remember listening to one of your first set of J. Abraham tapes in 1992 was the first time. And you had some carpet cleaners. And I think back then you were charging like three grand an hour or something and, and they could not afford you, these two guys that owned the carpet cleaning business. And so they scraped up $2,000 to hire you. And I think you gave him 45 minutes for two grand. And what you told them is you explain lifetime value of a customer and you are great at explaining the whole J. Abraham. You don't know how much you can afford to spend until and unless you know how much a client is actually worth to you. And so you'd explain to them lifetime value of a customer and go out and spend a month giving away carpet cleaning for free. Because what will happen is you will develop reciprocity and then they will refer you and they'll do business with you again. And so what happened is they went to churches and trade shows and neighborhoods and just offered like an entire houses of carpet cleaning. And people would tip them and they'd refer them and things like that. And I was like, huh? So I was like, what if I just gave away a free room of carpet cleaning? So I started doing that, and then I created a thing called a carpet audit. Because I didn't want to do a free quote. I wanted to do something different. And I developed this system for myself. And then I went to a dry cleaner of clothing was my first joint venture, who already had a developed relationship with people that were bringing their clothing. And I said, can I clean the carpets in your house or your. Or your dry cleaner here to show you the services I do, and if you like it, then can we talk about offering services to your clients? Because I wanted him to see my, you know, my services. And so he agreed to let me do his. The store. And so I cleaned the front entrance. It wasn't a ton of carpet, but it was the front entrance to this dry cleaner. Now what happened is I instilled reciprocity, but then over like the first year, he referred me and I gave him 10% commission of every job that I did. And he referred $25,000 worth of business to me that year. And what my offer was was a free room of carpet cleaning to all his clients. And another thing that I learned through you is that if you offer someone a gift, even if they do not avail themselves of it, you still get the benefit of the reciprocity by giving and you genuinely do it. You don't want to do it as a gimmick. I mean, if you are offering something to someone, you give it to them, right? And so what ended up happening was all of these people that stopped going to this dry cleaner. I asked after I did a few jobs and people reported back, I was like, can I have your list? And I will call them. I will. Physically, there was no Internet back then. This is like literally manual marketing, right? And putting postcards and signs on his store. I even got him to put little door hangers over the clothing that said, you know, ask us about our free carpet Cleaning. But here's the point as it relates to everybody is I then started teaching carpet cleaners to go out and say they're gonna hire a landscaper, a pool cleaner, an electrician, a painter, a pest control company, all of these, you know, asphalt like everything, you know, and they're going to, you have a relationship with them, you know, different service businesses. And the fact is, like why is your interior designer writing to you about a carpet cleaner? Why is your carpet cleaner writing to you about a real estate agent? And all of a sudden it became this whole joint venture thing. And so every time one of my carpet cleaners was wanted to add another hundred grand to their business, I would say who is the joint venture? Or refer that you can develop and establish a relationship with, they can refer that business to you. And right now that opportunity I think exists in greater levels than ever before. Because, you know, there's this anxiety and there's all these people trying to figure out and many of the comments that people have posted here with these ideas, I mean, I think that's just the way to look at it. And I only bring this up because I was a Deborah carpet cleaner that was just trying to figure out how to learn marketing. Still doing the carpet cleaning myself and I still manage to build and grow my business doing all this sort of stuff. And now with that level of knowledge and how easy it is with the Internet and the spreading of messages, there's just such a great, and the need of it is such a great opportunity.

Hi Periscope. There we go. Very, very nice. All right, so a year ago or so, hardly anyone had even heard of Periscope or Meerkat or Blab or Facebook mentions. And right now we all have this portable television studio in our pockets and we could broadcast to the entire connected planet for free and build an audience. And what we're going to talk about today is about owning time, which is really the most valuable asset that we have in our lives. And it starts with a little story. About 15 years ago I was in Palm Desert with my then pregnant wife Vivian. She walked into a little shop. I called a friend of mine. His name is Merlin Quiggle, I kid you not. That poor man. And Merlin is a producer. He produces all sorts of events and he's been doing marketing for about 30 years. I said, hey Merlin, what are you doing? He says, I out buying Rolex watches, three of them for people who are responsible for giving me all the business I've had for my 25 year career. I said that's a really nice gift. Why are you giving them a Rolex watch? He said, who do you think they're gonna think of every time they check the time? I slapped my head and I thought that was one of the smartest things I've ever heard. I don't know if you know this, but do you know how many times the average person checks their phone every day? Okay, the average is 150 times. And if you think about it, if you add up the number of times that people check their phones, their watches, their desktop, laptop computers, tablets, or watch their interactive televisions, it's incredible. They are trading and giving their time. And more importantly, Apple won. They're almost worth a trillion dollars right now, right? It's because they own your time, they own your mind, they own your wrist, they own your bathroom, bedroom experience, your car experience. So what we're talking about today is how to be seen, heard, viewed, listened to, anytime, anywhere, on demand, on any device. Because that's the business we're all in. And I like to think of it as if you can own someone's pocket in their bedroom and bathroom. Something is happening. It's very, very powerful. So right now there's roughly 300 million interactive televisions in use. If you add up Apple TVs and all the doodads and gadgets that are connecting TVs these days, roughly 2 billion tablet devices, 3 billion Internet connected laptop and desktop computers, and we're at about 7 billion or more, growing very, very quickly the number of Internet connected accounts, most of us have 6 to 25 Internet connected devices in our homes today. Okay, that's after just doing a lot of surveying. So the next thing, oh, and there's about 4 billion smartphones that are being sold every two years. That's actually according to Peter. So if you think about the level of access we have to multi trillion dollar infrastructures and brands that are willing to broadcast your message across multiple channels to any device, anytime on demand. The question is, what do you need to do to stand out and be in front of all those people? So again, look at all these brands you got. The most valuable brands in the world are willing to broadcast and distribute your content free of charge, giving you access to their customers. So if you think about it, and this is the way I think about it, right now, we are all in the education and entertainment business and those who take advantage of disruptive technology, these first are the winners historically. And you look at some of our entertainers up here, all of them have figured out how to own time. So the question is, how are we going to take advantage of that as marketers or business owners or people who want to change the world? One of my goals is to create a million entrepreneurs before I passed. And as of almost three years ago to this day, I finished my very last cancer treatment. So I'm lucky to be alive. And I came back with a new version vision, a very, very I just wanted to do this. This is what charges me up. And I think there's a renaissance going on. Right now we have the ability to broadcast a message. Why not do great things? Why not create immense wealth using entrepreneurship as the model? So if you think about the evolution of marketing feedback, the challenge is how do you get as much feedback as possible so you can change and refine your message? If you think about direct marketing, direct mail it it used to take a couple of weeks or months because you'd have to write your letters, send them out and wait and see what the response was. Now if you just advance your radio and commercials, social media, ads, et cetera, et cetera, we can do it quickly. But now it's possible to do it in seconds. And that the big idea is feedback driven intimacy. The faster you speed the process of gaining trust, the more time you own. It's just a matter of time before someone will want to buy from you. To say, I like this person, I think they can help me and I want to connect with them. I know they've got a tool or resource. I got that from Bill Harris originally. I kind of messed it up right now. I like this person. They really know what they're talking about and I think they can help me. There you go. So what's the solution? Well, it's webcasts. Now a few years ago, in about 2009, we started experimenting with these. These are live online interactive broadcasts. The opportunity to broadcast video, interact with an audience through chat, be able to say, hey, share this online and click a button to buy. Or we could actually create products these ways. Back then it cost 20,000 to $30,000 to do a show. Now you can do it with Google Hangouts for free or blab or any of these other tools and create a very, very rapidly engaged audience just by top talking to them. And whether you're talking to one or five or 50 or 500 or 5,000 or 500,000 people, which you can do for free, you can create this feedback loop through chat and actually read the minds of your audience in real time. So the way we've been using it and teaching a lot of other entrepreneurs, how to do it. And just think about this again. I think a renaissance is about to occur. Television production is going to change dramatically because of this technology. It's going to radically change education, too. So what we started doing is this notion of something called you everywhere now. So if you can create content once and distribute it in real time to as many devices as possible, the notion is you could perform your content as an educator or as an entertainer, you could convert it very quickly into a video and distribute it on the major video sites, chop it up into chunks.

You could.

You could also turn it into a podcast. You could save it as an audio, you could save it as a video. We've also started converting that content into books, putting them on Amazon and taking advantage of that channel. What we find is that someone that watches a live video is going to be different than someone who watches a podcast or listens to a podcast or reads a book or a paperback book. Same content created over and over again. Then we can put it and create podcasts. One of the products, rather one of the strategies we've used is we will perform a product live, interactively, getting feedback and adjusting our approach and saving that in a membership site in real time. We're able to create a documentary in real time as well. And we've seen other people start using this strategy over and over again. Then you distribute to social sites, same content repurposed, reused to blogs. And also it helps you get attention in the traditional media as well. So again, create once, distribute everywhere, any device on demand. We've been calling this the you everywhere now strategy or approach. So I want to show you something I call the Intimacy Dashboard. Because the question is, what do you need so you can read the minds and build an intimate relationship as quickly as possible with this engaged audience. So this is one of my studios. It's a whole bunch of monitors. The good news is you don't have to have all this fancy equipment to to make this work yourself if you're using something like Google Hangouts. But we've broken it down into what tools you need to read this information quickly. So we have a timer, make sure we're on track, a presentation prompter, camera's above it so we can look at the screen and see what we're about to present. Maybe you've got a keynote presentation, you've got some notes, your next and previous slide, a monitor so you can see what the audience sees. But here's where things get interesting. Using a Google Doc, I have a producer who's typing notes and telling me what people are saying in real time, keeping me on track. So you only need one assistant to do this Sometimes I have team chat, my technical team saying here's what's going on. The shopping cart's down. Wait for a little while delay, all right, then the stats. So I know how many people are watching, how many people are in checkout. When I say click the orange buy button, how many people people are buying so I can acknowledge the people who are investing in real time. And finally, the viewer chat. This is the hub of everything because I can ask a question, get feedback immediately, adjust the presentation, adjust the approach. So quick study JJ Virgin. Gotta talk about her. She's my sister from another mother. We started doing podcasts together or rather webcasts. She's had multiple six figure days, New York Times best seller status. We're converting on shows that last seven to eight and a half hours. Most people say that's impossible. They stay, they watch and they buy. Converting 38 to 52% of the average viewers into buyers because they're engaging intimate conversations. And the most important thing that JJ said to me is look, I learn more about my audience in two hours than I have in 10 years doing surveys as a result of doing webcast. We've also put this together, a combination of a PBS special with a TED Talk, nine presenters all together. Dave Asprey, Elizabeth Lombardo performing, cooking, bringing on guests. And the results, 30,000 opt ins, 9,000 viewers peak an average of 5,400. But here's where things got interesting. Almost half the viewers bought the product because they felt like they had an intimate relationship with J.J. virgin and the other viewers. And in a replay with live chat, people think and feel and this is done completely transparently, no shenanigans going on. They are still interacting with the host because someone is interacting with them live with chat able to replay that over and over again. The long format, eight and a half hour shows. People said this is crazy. Who's going to stick around? Almost 40% of the average viewers stick around to the end. And we started a health network as a result of this. John Assaraf's also used the same thing. Recording weekly evergreen webcasts that play over and over again. He's producing a million to 2 million in sales with a cold audience.

Lee, how would you define marketing and why do you love marketing?

Well, marketing connects people and for my companies I'm always looking for a way to allow people to see what do we do, how do we do it and how we can serve them. So, like in the veterinary industry, we have a holistic hospital. So we're looking for that top 5% of people who love their pets so much they will do anything. And they come to us and we teach them proactive care and we teach them how to have a longer, healthier life with their pets and people who want to do better in the world. I just absolutely love supporting them on their journey train.

Yep.

So, Dean, we're going to talk about mindset. So I wanted to ask Lee, what is your perspective on the entrepreneurial mindset? I mean, what does that actually mean to you and how do you think about mindset? Because, you know, we can give people all the different strategies and ideas all day long, but their ability to do something with it, I think has a lot to do with their mindset.

100% starts in mindset. And we actually just did a five day auction online, a five day challenge online. And one of the things that we learned is the very first day, we brought in a mindset expert to help the entire community have the same frame of reference around how to approach things. And the first thing is, you know, I start every single day in a gratitude circle, sometimes with my team, sometimes with my family. But every single day, I'm looking for the good. I'm looking for the things to celebrate. And I realized that in anything, you could look at a perspective one way or another. You could look at it that it's empowering you and helping you have a better life, or you can look at it that it's hard and a struggle and everyone's going to have things that are difficult and struggles. But how do you convert it to something that's more empowering in your life? Right. A friend of mine, Brandy Gilmore, taught me years ago to look at my stories, whether it's in work or personal, look at my stories. And as I'm telling a story, looking for the piece that's most powerful and most amount of love for myself, and stop the straight air. Don't continue the story to when something went wrong or something didn't show up or somebody disappointed me. She said, wire stories in your brain so that it's the most empowering, filled with the most love, so that you're carrying those stories forward with you.

Yeah.

Great.

All right. So with that, let's talk about something that me and Dean have spent hundreds of hours discussing on I love marketing, which is how to get more customers. So what are some of the best ways that you've discovered in your careers, your businesses, to get More clients.

Twenty years ago, I bought a veterinary hospital that had already been around for 40 years, right? So it was 2001, it started in 1961. When I bought the hospital, it had 3,500 current clients. In the following 10 years, I took that 3,500 and turned it into 25,000 clients who literally came and saw us in person, one at a time. And what I learned is it really is consistent action every day, every single day, we had different ways that we reached out. And in the center of my mind map, it says attracting new clients. And then we had 13 different ways they could find us, right? We had a mind map, 13 days, 13 ways. And the reason it's 13 ways is because there's 13 weeks and a quarter. And every we deep dive on one of them. One might be networking, one might be JVs, one might be social media. Doesn't mean we ignore the other ones. But each week we deep dive on one and get really crystal clear on our plan for that quarter. And then we repeated the next quarter. But it started with the mind map I wrote maybe 20, 25 years ago. And I still use that foundation. But in 2008, when the market crashed and veterinary hospitals were empty, they had hallowed halls. They were taking clients and making them part time employees. We were bursting at the seams and the group was wondering, like, how did we always have more clients coming in, even in a down market? And it was because consistently, every single day, we were doing marketing things every day, no matter what. Something I would test might be Facebook ads in another city and then count how many new clients we got from that city. But I made it fun for the team too. I will give them ways that they can participate, kind of gamify it at the front desk. How many calls did they close and turn into appointments for the team? How many people came to us from Yelp and counting it and seeing how they converted it. And the more we gamify it, make it fun for the team and they get to win as well, the more fun it is for me.

Love it. Well, you know, you're quite familiar with elf. Go ahead, Dean, what are you going to say? I was going to say that's a lot like I power. Like what? Getting your team members involved in the process. Because everybody's got great ideas. You just need good direction by framing the question that's going to elicit the great response. I remember reading there's a great book about Albert Lasker, who was one of the old original advertising men, and when they were Selling refrigerators. You know, back when refrigeration was brand new, one of the things that people were afraid of is that they didn't want to have something that was plugged in all the time and sucking electricity because they were new to the whole. You had this meter outside your house that you could see it moving, and when that's moving, it's costing you money. So people were weighing the benefits of having refrigeration versus their fear of this bottomless pit of electricity spent. And they said, he tasked the entire company. He said, we need some phrase that makes people comfortable with Frigidaire as the brand that they can trust for refrigeration. Somebody who was the equivalent of in the mail room came up with the idea that every Frigidaire is equipped with Meter Miser technology. Just those words, Meter Miser said exactly what you need words to say to say, it's watching your back. It's not going to take any more electricity than it absolutely needs to. And that was really the thing that made people comfortable choosing Frigidaire over all the others, because all the others are just money pits. But you better get that Meter Miser, because that one will save us the most money.

Really big key you said in there, Dean, too. And it's Genius, which is coming up with the right phrase that allows your customer to feel comfortable with their decision. They want evidence they made a great decision. Right. And one of the things I taught my front desk, Joe, which was really important in the shift in closing clients at the front desk is no matter what the client asks them, the first thing to say is, yes, I can help you with that.

Absolutely.

Because then it puts their mind at ease that they have the right person and the right person who really cares about helping them. And just by using that one phrase, even if they have to say, you know what, I have to check on the answer and call you back, it's okay. Because they set up the relationship of I do want to help you. And I think that that's just been really key in my business, is that my clients feel like the team sees them and listens and cares.

Hey, Joe, I just saw Evan Carmichael's here too. Yes. We need to do a shout out for Evan and we. Evan is just a master at YouTube videos. If you don't follow him, follow him on YouTube. He's got 2.6 million subscribers, over 385 million views. I know that because he was just a guest on the Genius Network meeting we just had. And we're going to be Doing a jam session with him at the Genius Network annual event November 6th, 7th and 8th because it was such a big hit. But interview on his, on his channel right now with Kevin o' Leary from Shark Tank. He brilliantly did a two parter with him where it's one half of the interview on his channel, 1/2 on Kevin O' Leary's channel. So what is a great model for collaboration there? Well, Evan, why don't you pop on and explain what that is and then post it in in the link so people can watch those interviews. And if there's anything that you want to say to either make fun of Dean or to ask Lee or mention anything, feel free. Wherever you're at out there, bouncing on his trampoline. I'm sure where you at right now? I am on my trampoline and I.

Just discovered Dean is a fellow Torontonian.

So we can't make fun of him. We gotta only show love. Shout out to Lee and her website too, because I was on and she's got this. If you haven't seen Lee's website, I popped it in the chat and it's this epic video across the top of her coaching and speaking and with Oprah and high fiving and it's like, wow, how did she do that? I wanna, I gotta get Lee's website people on board. But I think that's a great.

Joe's on there too.

Joe, you made your appearance.

You're like right after Oprah on there.

It's.

The link.

I don't know where the link is. I'm sure it's somewhere off my YouTube channel. But Kevin O' Leary is trying to grow on his YouTube channel and he wanted to do something. He wanted to do more collabs. And he happens to be in Toronto as well. He wanted to do something in person because all of his stuff has now been, you know, remote and, you know, Covid era. And so we connected and we did.

A two part series.

We had two hours or so of time to talk. And what we did was we took questions from both of our audiences.

What do you want us to answer?

And then we went through about 11 or 12 questions and we put half on my channel and half on his channel. And since I edited it or my team was editing and filming it, we took our favorite questions and then gave him the rest. But they're still good on both channels. And one of the great things you.

Can do on YouTube is there's a.

Thing called an end card which in the last 20 seconds of every video.

You can call things out and it's clickable.

So that could be your PDF download, that could be your lead magnet, that could be Sign up for your email. That could be your website, that could be your offer that you want to send people to. And so what we did was we did a thing at the end where we said, hey, if you want to see part two of this interview, go check it out on Kevin's channel or on Evan's channel. And we call it the Kevin and Evan show for that day. And it's just great to do collaboration.

So anybody who's doing YouTube, I always.

Love Genius Network events. They're great, amazing people. Huge warm hearts here. And so I'm looking forward to the annual event and jamming out with all you guys.

Awesome.

Yeah. And there's a bunch of Genius Network members that are here, too. So Evan's going to do a whole session on just how to really build and grow a sustainable YouTube channel, which is awesome. So, Lee, you know a lot about elf. Easy, lucrative, and fun. Running an elf business versus a half business, which I refer to as hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating. What does an elf business mean to you? Because you tend to have a lot of fun in what you do.

It's true. And that is the actual criteria when I'm taking on a project. Is it easy? Is it lucrative? Is it fun? MIT knows it as well. They run it through the same filter. I actually spoke to 8,500 event planners last month, and I drilled this home so much that one of them sent me a gift with Lee Richter. Easy, lucrative, and fun. I'm like, well, it's actually Joe Polish, but I get credit. But they just have heard it so much because I think, why make it anything else than easy, lucrative, and fun? Especially at this time in my life when I have so many choices. And that is literally the filter I go through first for every project, it has to meet those three criteria. Seems so simple. But there's things that don't meet that criteria. And I cut it out.

Yeah, I love it. And that. Actually, that term was given to me by my friend Mark Schneider, who. Who recently passed away. And it has been a great criteria on not just marketing, because I've actually trademarked elf marketing. Right. And so if you do use it, you have to give me credit because else we're gonna just sue you. Really? No, I'm kidding. Well, it depends. We may see you. It depends if you totally plagiarize my shit. But I love the term elf and I recommend using it as A criteria, use it as a process. And it's helped me. I used to think of it just as marketing, you know, doing automated robotic types of marketing methodologies. But I now apply ELF to people, projects, anything. Because if it's not money, it's is it easy, liberating and fun? I even applied into my personal life. So I'm going to take next year as a sabbatical. And so there's going to be a lot of things that need to be just ELF for me that aren't money related, but they're, you know, it has to be liberating. So I highly encourage it as a filter because the genius network members that we have a tool called ELF versus Half, where they list what are the people and the projects and things in their life that are elf and what are the things that are hard, annoying, lame and frustrating and really take a look at, you know, how do you eliminate the half and how do you get to the elf? So one thing I want to, I have this question I wrote down here, and then I'm going to ask Jeff Madoff to ask you a question about pr. How can people utilize tough times? As many people in the world have been going through incredibly difficult times with the pandemic, how can people utilize tough times as a springboard for greater success? And what does that word that gets thrown around a lot, success, mean to you?

Well, success is that I have freedom of time and I can make choices on how to spend time. That time, that's what money buys me, is freedom of choice, period. That's how I see it the way right now. You know what, looking at tough times, the first thing I did, I remember on March 16, I sat down with my manager. I'm like, what has changed in our world right now? We wrote a list of 25 things that have changed based on Covid and the pandemic, but immediately turned it into what can we do about it? And then a week later on Slack, they were celebrating how things were actually getting better. But it was because we were identifying the challenge and overcoming it together that they were excited about it. Right? They weren't afraid anymore. And they also knew if any changes happened, they'd find it on Slack. So they didn't have to worry about us making different changes and doing things in the company unless they were included. But I tell you, we have had so many more opportunities come out of this pandemic. Our company's up 31% this year. The team feels essential, they feel excited, they feel like people really need them. And Want them. And so what I do is I highlight that every Friday I write here's 10 things we're celebrating right now. And one of the things I've learned is to share that list with our clients coming in too, so that they could see the value of the team. And by sharing it not only with the team, but with the clients, they could see we're celebrating the team, but also what we have to overcome as well. Because the clients are coming with their perspective of what they have to overcome, overcome, but they're not thinking about all the things we have to do to be there ready for them. And so I think by highlighting that it's now elevated on both sides, the appreciation. The clients appreciate the team more and the team appreciates their position more. They have seen so many people lose jobs, lose opportunities. And even last Friday was bosses day. And they came in and they wrote me this beautiful card. And each one of them is like, thank you for being a leader and helping us be happy rather than scared. And I think a lot of that is just being consistent, sharing what is the challenge and then overcoming it together.

As I mentioned to you yesterday, in a few weeks I'll be 82 years old. I literally go 12, 14 hours a day, five and a half days a week. Do not know the name of anybody that keeps up with me at any age. Plus, I enjoy every minute of it. Our company is 50 years old this year. We'll mail between now and election day next year, November. About 150 million postal letters, 2,300 million emails. We have 75 employees. Most of them are really high powered direct marketers operating at a very high level. 1961, I get the opportunity to go to New York to become executive secretary of a political youth organization that had been founded a few months earlier, earlier on Bill Buckley's family estate. So I run this organization. I'm in charge of everything, including fundraising. And I found out real quick, like, I didn't like asking people for money. I asked some very famous people for. For contributions. Charles Edison, youngest son of the Indian inventor, J. Howard Pugh of Sun Oil Company, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker of Eastern Airlines. And they were generous, gave me nice contributions, but I didn't like that. So I started writing letters that seemed to work. I got something called a mimeograph machine, started turning them out with a mimeograph machine, hired secretaries, a few here and there. And after a year and a half, I said, hey, I want to be relieved of all duties in the organization except fundraising through direct mail. Want to Focus on that. Did that for a year and a half, and by then I had a wife and two babies. And I said, I'm out of here. I'm going to start my company. And I thought I knew everything there ever was to know about marketing. Of course, I knew nothing. I didn't know a fraction of 1% of what I know now, but I thought I did. But what I was, I was blind in one eye and had blurred vision in the other, but everybody else was totally blind in terms of direct marketing, so I looked pretty good. But though I knew, I thought I knew much more than I did. Of course, there was one thing I knew I didn't have I needed, and that was names and addresses, people to communicate with. And in the summer of 64, I discovered that if you were running for president, you had to file with the clerk of the House of Representation representatives, all of your $50 plus donors. I went down there for a couple of days with the legal pad and started writing Barry Goldwater's $50 plus donors. And I did that for a couple days and said, hey, Richard, you're not making a lot of progress here. So I hired five or six women, and after a couple months, I had 12,500. That gave me the courage, the confidence to quit a good job with a wife and two babies and go where no one had gone before. No one had literally had done political fundraising through postal mail before. And that's one of the most important things you can do in life. We'll talk about that here in a little bit about branding. If you can at all you want to be first, can you be first? And if you can't be first in some category, find a category where you can be first and where you can own that category. I've been in multiple groups of different times. People were talking about me, not knowing that I was in the group there, and they were talking about me because I was first. You know, who knows the name of the second pope who was the second person to fly solo across the Atlantic? You know, nobody knows. Okay, it's the first. So whatever, you know, find a category that you can own that you can be first in, and that's how you build your brand. So, anyway, I did that for the next 15 years and had no competitors, basically. And by the way, I caught a lot of criticism because I was doing something no one had ever done before, and I was regularly, literally regularly attacked on cbs, abc, NBC, cnn, New York Times, Time magazine, and Republicans and Democrats. The establishment was coming really hard at me. But all a sudden of, of the criticism stopped within a few hours. And a few hours was election night, November 1980. Aha. That's what Vigory has been up to, okay? And so the left had been relying mostly for their campaign funds on involuntary sources, the union dues, corporation foundations, et cetera. And so they ran out there real quick like, and tried to replicate, duplicate what we had been doing. And I told my conservative friends, don't worry, you know, it's taken me 15 years to do what I'm doing here. And besides, I'm smarter than they are, so it's going to take them 20 years to catch up with us. Not so. And within three or four years, in my opinion, the left caught up with the conservatives. And to this day, they do a far better job, the left does, than the right does in marketing. Think of the 2008 campaign. Obama had 3 million donors to his campaign. I haven't been able to see numbers for 2012, but it's something north of $3 million plus 10 million additional names of his supporters on email. Huge. Republicans had nothing like that. And so as a general rule, to this day, the Republicans are not doing the job they need to do to be competitive with the Democrats. So one of the things that I do to this day at age be 82 in a few weeks, as I said, I spend two to three hours every day studying marketing. I don't need to do that, but I do two to three hours, six days a week studying marketing. And, and that's one thing I can leave with you more than anything else. Study, study, study marketing. I don't know of a competitor that I have on the right that spends two or three hours a month studying marketing. Okay, I've developed something that I call Vigory's Four Horsemen of Marketing. You've got to get these four things right and get them right. Life is downhill, the wind to your back, pretty easy. Get any of them wrong, you're going uphill, the wind in your face, highly unlikely you're going to succeed. And I'll explain each one, but just the four things briefly are position, differentiation, benefit, and brand. Position is nothing more than a whole hole in the marketplace. What hole in the marketplace can you occupy that no one else is occupying there? And you do that, by the way, privately. That's something you just, and I like to use the example say, of Rupert Murdoch, so Roger Ailes, 20 years ago, they're thinking about setting, building a national cable television news network. They don't sit there and say, well, CBS does This, we'll do this. ABC does this, cnn, they don't care what they do because they're going to occupy a hole in the marketplace right of center. 50% of the country is not being served by television news. Life gets pretty simple at that point. Okay, then differentiation is what you do publicly. So publicly they differentiated themselves from all the other television Networks with Bill O'Reilly, Megyn Kelly Hannity, Glenn Beck for a while, okay? That's how they differentiated themselves from the others. Third benefit is obvious. You get news and information on Fox, you don't get anywhere else, okay, Fourth brand. Brand is the ball game, okay? That's products these days are seldomly sold. They are bought, okay, I bought this week a new car. New car to me it's a few years old, but they didn't sell me the car, I bought the car, okay? They could have had hundred different types of cars out there. I was looking at my daughter's strong and wife's strong recommendation for a Lexus, okay? I wanted a Lexus and that was it. I didn't have to be sold. I bought that car. You go into the supermarket now, 40, 50,000 items to sold. Not one salesperson in the store. They will check you out, but Nobody's saying no, Mr. Vigory, you shouldn't buy this brand of paper towels. Buy this one over here. I'm a viva man, I like viva paper towels. That's what I'm going to buy. I'm sure Bounty makes a good paper towel. But I've been sold before I walk into that store. And so brand is so important for success in your marketing. So position is what you do privately. Differentiation. You differentiate yourself from your competitors by whatever you do to differentiate yourself. Benefit is number three and then fourth is brand. And by the way, I do almost nothing in my life of any consequence, any important without a four writ, four part plan. We used to get off a lot of us in the late 70s, early 80s, 2025, for a long weekend, Friday, Saturday, and we'd plot and plan for the try to bring conservatives to power. And we'd come up with a problem. There was a young congressman from Georgia, part of our group of 2025, Newt Gingrich. He didn't invariably when we came up with a problem, go to the blackboard. We, we didn't have whiteboards in those days. And he'd write four words on there, Vision, goal, strategy and tactics. An hour later we had filled in those four words and we saw a clear path forward of how we should proceed. That's not the only way to do a plan, but that's a good way to do a plan. It's simple, doesn't take very long. And by the way, the number one benefit of a plan is not working. The plan, that's important, but that's secondary. The number one benefit of writing a plan is writing the plan. Because as you write the plan, it clarifies your thinking, it crystallizes you. Thought you wanted to go over here, but as you write it down you say, no, I think I need to go over here. More of this, less of that. So the exercise of writing the plan is so, so important. Joe said yesterday that Dan Sullivan gives me a lot of credit for Reagan's election. Quite frankly, I appreciate the compliment, but it's nonsense. And I've seen different people at different times take excessive credit for Reagan's election victories and whatever. And it reminds me of a slow moving freight train and somebody running along pushing that freight train. Look at me, look at me, what I'm doing. Reagan with a freight train. And the rest of us had very little to do. The one thing though that was very, very helpful to Reagan was what was something called the New right that came into being in the mid-70s and the entire conservative movement began to come together in the 60s and, and the 70s with hundreds and hundreds of new organizations. And almost every single one of these organizations was funded. They got their membership, they sold their books, they sold their subscriptions through direct mail. And Reagan, when he ran and lost in 76 and ran and won in 80, was running against the entire Republican establishment for the most part. Bob Dole, of course, Jerry Ford, George Bush, John Connally, Howard Baker, and they were getting the thousand dollar gifts. Reagan depended upon the $10, $15, 25, $50. And he had 250,000 of those people. And so the small givers through direct mail just changed American history. March of 1976. Reagan is literally out of money writing commercial airline. And his aide Lyn Nofsinger goes on and buys $90,000 worth of time on NBC. Reagan sits on a stool much like this, I guess for 25 minutes, 3-30-1976, and makes a 25 minute stump speech. The last five minutes he asked for contributions. About a million six hundred thousand dollars came in and that was huge back in 1976, turned his campaign around, allowed him to go to Kansas City that summer and get 49% of the vote against the sitting president and propelled him onward in 1980 for success. And if he hadn't been able to do that In March of 76, he would have never been the candidate that he was in 1980. There's a number of odds and ends here, but I know Joe wants to get, get to some Q and A here. But let me just mention a few things here. I know a lot of you are focused on marketing through the Internet and that's important. You need to do that. Obviously, we certainly do it at our company. But the workhorse of marketing today in my opinion is still direct mail. And when I started in 1961 and you York City direct mail was the second largest form of advertising in the country. Today in 2015, it's the second largest form of advertising in the country. And by the way, I understood that most people in the nonprofit community to this day and in commercial world as well do not understand, do not comprehend that direct mail is advertising. Okay, so in late 70s, David Broder, the preeminent political correspondent in Washington D.C. at that time, since passed on just a giant at his time, came to see me and he sat down in my office and we had a casual conversation for an hour or two. And this is late 1970s. And he said, Richard, I'm perplexed. I've been all over Capitol Hill, the White House, et cetera. The Democrats have almost a two thirds majority in the House and the Senate got the White House. Nothing is happening for the Democrats. They're not able to pass their legislation. And said, I've been to Walter Mondale's office. The Vice President, he can't help me. Nobody knows what. Do you know what's happening out there? Well, I don't know David, if this will be of help. But I began to explain to him what we were doing, mailing 100 million postal letters a year, doing this and that, all of a under the radar. And when we were mailing those 100 million letters, we were very focused on passing legislation mostly in those days trying to defeat the Democrats proposed legislation. Jimmy Carter saw him in an interview just this week complaining about he had announced in March, April 1977 that he wanted to change the election laws in four ways. Devastating, devastating to the Republicans. Like instant voter registration. You just show up on election day, say I live down the street, I want to vote, federal financing of elections, et cetera. And so anyway, a friend of mine calls at night, woke me up at 10:30 and I said, Paul, you know we can, we can beat this. He had just come from meeting of Republican senators saying we can't stop this bad idea, but it's a time has Come. And so it's going to pass. I said, we can defeat this. Let's talk in the morning. I'm going back to bed. So we did. We got together for four or five months at my home, my office, et cetera, and we designed the strategy through direct mail, using it as advertising. And we defeated all four pieces of legislation. And to this day, Democrats are still complaining that it didn't get passed. But it was the power of direct mail. Just briefly, a few high points. There were some very good questions submitted to Joe here, but most of them weren't dealing with a lot of the weeds of direct mail. So I may get these questions here, but I'll just briefly say, long letters output, short letters counterintuitive. And by the way, most of what we know about direct mail is counterintuitive. You don't want to go to a doctor with an appendicitis attack and say, doctor said, let's go into surgery right away. Great, doc, whatever you say. By the way, where'd you go to school? Medical school? Oh, I didn't. I'm just a natural appendix puller. It just comes to me and funny, my father was a natural appendix puller and his father said, no, you're looking for a deviant at that time, okay, it is deviant behavior to lay somebody on a table and cut them up and do what doctors do. Okay? So this, what we do is learn behavior. Most people, and you have to be careful about direct mail. It's very expensive. It does great and wonderful things, but it can also be very, very expensive. And you can lose a lot of money because people say, well, I learned to write in the first grade. I know where they sell postage stamps. What's the big deal? It is a big deal. That's why I spend two or three hours every day studying marketing.

So.

If you're going to do a big marketing campaign, get a professional involved. It'll reap great benefits for you. So long letters, I pull short letters. Short paragraphs are better than long paragraphs. Use one or two syllable words. Don't use big words that stop people in their reading. It was a wonderful book called the Man Nobody Knows, written back in the 1920s by a congressman. At the time, talking, he was a major advertising executive. And the man nobody knows was Jesus Christ. And he described how he communicated with one and two syllable words. Christ didn't use a lot of three and four, five syllable words. Write to one person. You may be sending it to a million people. Write to one person who is a likely Prospect, summarize your whole mailing if you can, in a PS Test, test, test test headlines, test offers, test price. A lot of you have names of your organization doesn't mean anything. So sometimes you need what we call a tagline, a sub headline. Joe, I like these coffee cups and these glasses, but Genius Network doesn't say anything. If it says something like the world's largest gathering of marketing professionals or something like that, what's the genius? Is it, you know, Mensa Society, is it, you know, PhDs, whatever it is. So just a little tagline on there indicating that this is a collection of the world's largest, you know, high powered market or something like that. So anyway, taglines, sometimes your name just doesn't, doesn't say anything. So you need to tell people what, what it says there. And so Joe, that could go on for a long time. But that covers the highlights. I wanted to say.

No, that's great. That's great. I often wondered about things like that, like how, yeah, how you, you know, how people do things. I'm sure there's lots of examples of that. We don't know about the same product in. I have a couple. You do? I knew it.

Morton salt is literally the exact same product as generic salt. If you send it to a lab, they can't tell the difference. But Morton's able to charge 187% more. I did an experiment to try to understand what is a commodity. When somebody buys a commodity product, are they paying more? When, when, when. Two things that are exactly the same and they're willing to pay more for one. Are they paying for the brand? Are they paying for their perception of the product? So to test this, I, I gave people two pairs of sunglasses that were exactly the same. I said, okay, one pair had no logo and the other pair had a Chanel logo. And I said, how much would you be willing to pay for these two glasses? And they were willing to pay 400% more for the pair with Chanel logo, which means they were buying sunglasses, but they were paying for their perception of the product or more importantly, how other people would perceive them. So the way this relates to entrepreneurs, to small business owners, to leaders, is it's about the perception that you're creating on your differentiation. And there's no one right way to differentiate in the speaking world. When I started, I couldn't figure out what's the correlation between a speaking fee and how much that speaker is willing to charge. Is it reputation, is it reviews, is it connections, status? And so I looked at Top speakers. And on speaking sites, there's a dropdown menu just like Amazon. Which category are you looking for?

Right.

In speaking, the category is economics, politics, comedy. And what I found was that speakers who used the word innovation to describe their topic made on average $5,000 more per keynote than speakers who used the category creativity.

Oh, wow.

Innovation and creativity. You could take the same speech and simply change the word, but innovation had a much higher perception because innovation is a means to an end, whereas creativity is perceived as a process that doesn't necessarily have a benefit.

Boy, that's really. That is interesting.

And so it's an example of different. How to make your product. By a very subtle nuance, the product becomes different, which thereby makes it be perceived as better through marketing.

I love it. I love it. I want to see what kind of questions maybe people. Hey, Dean, can I get in this conversation real briefly or. Hi, Sally. It's so fun. Is that really you or are we being catfished right now? So, first of all, Sally, I was going to introduce you on this, and I got delayed flying. And I'm such a huge fan of everything you do. You know, it's probably. What was it, Sally? Three or four years ago at a Genius Network annual event, you were on the stage with a panel of female spectacular entrepreneurs. You, JJ Virgin and Kelly, Robin Roberts.

Lisa Sasevich.

Robin. That's right. But I heard you say, and your book title's a little different than I remember, but you said, it's better to be different than it is to be better. And that was like the highlight for me for that annual event. I wrote it down. I've quoted you so many times since that time. But here's one that kind of a case study, Sally, I'd love for you to comment about. So back in the 20th century, I worked. That's kind of funny to put it that way. Yeah, I worked for Hair Club for Men. I was actually. I became vice president of Hair Club for Men. And when I joined them, they were doing about 8 million a year. Then we took it to $120 million a year. So we did well. But Cy Sperling, 1970, he says, I want to get into the. The hairpiece business. Hairpiece business. And it was a commodity. Dean's hairpieces, Schwa's wigs, Russ's toupees, it was all the same. And Cy Sperling comes along and he says he was selling the exact same thing, but he called his company Hair Club for Men. So that was the first thing. That was the first Thing Hair Club for Men. And Cy didn't call it Schwa's Wigs or Dean's Toupees or Russ's Hairpieces. He called it the strand by strand method. It was the same thing, but he called it. He named it. He unique. Let's see, what does Dan Sullivan say? Unique naming process.

Right.

And then Schwa's Wigs and Dean's Toupees and Russ's Hairpieces, they sell for $500 size, strand by strand system. They sell for between $2,500 and $4,000. And people flocked to it. Oh, my goodness. They would go from states away, they would come to get the strand by strand method. Now, by the time I joined the company, they were different and better. They used a lot of that money and research and development and made something that was better than a hairpiece. But when I think of what you're talking about and I think of this case study, he entered a commodity, but he named his company really well. I think you can comment. He called it something different, gave it a unique trademark name and he priced it on a high level and it became an incredibly successful company.

That's a great example. And if you think of Certs with Retzen, there's no such thing as Retsen. The Pons Institute. There's no Pons Institute. There's women in lab coats. We did.

Wait a second, Wait a second. Blew my mind. I thought there was a Pons Institute.

Yeah, let's Google the address and go visit. And it's going to be on Madison Avenue.

So they do tours.

Yeah, yeah. Within my company, how to Fascinate. We had a lot of people who wanted to be affiliates, to be able to. To train and to coach. And when we thought of them as affiliates, it was sort of like they were customers. And so we created the Fascinate Certified Advisor program with certification. And now, because we made it a thing with a program and with steps.

Now.

We'Ve certified over 200 people. It's been required in Singapore. The government pays for it. There are dozens of them in Germany and in countries all over the world. And what that comes back to is that when you take something, it's an abstract process, or you take something that doesn't have a clear benefit and with subtle changes, you can make it ownable. You can make it not only trademarkable, but we just got our International Coaching Federation approval, which is incredibly exciting for us because now it means that. Yeah, so now our trainers and coaches are coming from that pool. Yeah, I encourage all of us to be thinking about what is something that you're already doing, right, that you're not getting credit for, because you either haven't, you haven't named it, but you haven't done what Tim said. Strand by strand is a way of taking a look at something that's happening as part of a process. That's a commoditized process, but, but, but looking at it through, through the eyes of the consumer, and that consumer wants a strand by strand process. They just, they don't know. They wouldn't know how they're, they wouldn't be able to understand the benefit to them through, through what other people were doing in that category. So that's a great example, Tim.

That's awesome.

Thank you.

I always say that's. That, that was. If you remember how he sold. That was a different strategy too, that I remember seeing, because that's right around the time I met you. Tim was 1997. Ish. 98 maybe.

Yeah.

And at the time he was running infomercials and saying how he got the idea from the cell phone industry where they give people the cell phone when you buy the plan, the, the, the ongoing plan, and it was the same for them. They would give you the hair which has the value and you sign up for. Because every month you have to go and get it adjusted or tightened. Is that what they would call it, say, adjusted? Adjusted, not tightened, but they include your hair. And as your hair grows, it gets, it loosens and you've got to batten down the hatches, I guess.

Yeah, that's the terminology consumers are thinking.

That's the terminology. Immediately in my mind, I immediately conceived of it. I'm going to share it here, world premiere. I've carried this around. I've told a select group of people individually in private conversations about my movie idea that that inspired. And I'm going to reveal it here in case anybody has the ability to help us get this movie made. So in my mind, as he's explaining this, I thought, that's brilliant, because once people get the hair, they're going to want to keep the hair. So I bet that their hair payment, they make the payment, they continue on with the process. I bet the lifetime value of a client is very high. And then I thought, but what if they don't pay? What happens then? Do they come and pull the plugs? Do they come and like, repossess the hair? How does that happen? And that immediately led me to this culture and underworld of these hair repossessors that work out of Back of the Barbershop kind of thing, like straight out of Quentin Tarantino movie like Repo and that. I thought about doing a part documentary mockumentary of this world of these people, but then it evolved into tying it into sort of a Weekend at Bernie's, kind of this political candidate who's running for office, but he didn't make his hair payments, and they're going to pull the plugs on him while he's on the.

Literally pull the plugs, tracking him down.

And they're going to pull the plugs like the hair Repo men. So there's my 30 seconds elevator pitch for the movie, if anybody would like to collaborate and make that happen. Oh, I thought you were going to show it. I thought you were going to show us, like, a teaser. But that is the teaser. Oh, okay. That is the teaser.

Okay.

I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here.

Go ahead.

They're over here.

Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you.

Watch them.